Liverpool in 1850's

[alex69]

Nathaniel Hawthorne, the American novelist (The Scarlet Letter) was American Consul in Liverpool. His diaries contain some interesting insights in to life in UK, including Liverpool, in the 1850's.

http://www.eldritchpress.org/nh/pfenb01.html for extracts.


Alex

Thanks to Alex69 for additional link. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=10A ... &q&f=false MA

[MaryA]

Thanks Alex, I'll move this to our Websites board so it will be kept.

[luxor]

Thanks a lot for this. Just a quick look reveals really wonderful descriptions of life from that time. Being a wealthy foreigner, he probably recorded details that locals would have dismissed through familiarity.

[Blue70]

Some quotes by the above mentioned American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne who arrived in Liverpool in 1853 and lived in Liverpool for four years and by French writer Hippolyte Taine who visited Liverpool in the 1860s, commenting on the poorer districts of Liverpool in an aloof and snooty tone using cruel but entertaining and colourful language in the process:-

Hawthorne was struck by:-

"the multitudinousness and continual motion of all this kind of life. The people are as numerous as maggots in cheese; you behold them, disgusting, and all moving about, as when you raise a plank or log that has long lain on the ground, and find many vivacious bugs and insects beneath it."

Hawthorne on alcohol:-

"men haggard, drunken, careworn, hopeless, but with a kind of patience, as if all this were the rule of their life."

"Ragged children come thither with old shaving-mugs or broken-nosed teapots or any such makeshift receptacle to get a little poison or madness for their parents."

Hawthorne on gin shops:-

"Gin shops, or what the English call spirit-vaults, are numerous in the vicinity of these poor streets and are set off with the magnificence of gilded door-posts, tarnished by contact with the unclean customers who haunt there. Inconceivably sluttish women enter at noonday and stand at the counter among boon companions of both sexes, stirring up misery and jollity in a bumper together and quaffing off the mixture with relish."

Hawthorne on women:-

"where a sharp tongue will not serve the purpose, they trust to the sharpness of their finger-nails, or incarnate a whole vocabulary of vituperative words in a resounding slap, or the downright blow of a doubled fist."

In Tithebarn Street, Hawthorne:-

"saw a woman suddenly assault a man, clutch at his hair, and cuff him about the ears. The man, who was of decent aspect enough, immediately took to his heels, full speed, and the woman after him; and as far as I could discern the pair, the chase continued."

Hawthorne on beggars:-

"the streets swarm with beggars by day and night."

He was particularly wary of the beggars in Brunswick Street. One was described as such a 'monster' that Hawthorne would walk a mile just to avoid him. Another unfortunate man, dressed in a sailor's jacket, had no arms or legs but nevertheless turned such an unnerving gaze on passers-by that they were transfixed:-

"You see him before you all at once, as if he had sprouted half-way out of the earth and would sink down and re-appear in some other place, the moment he has done with you".

Hawthorne on children:-

"My God, what dirty, dirty children! And the grown people are the flowers of these buds, physically and morally."

He also described the dehumanised girls from the workhouse, locked in a primitive stage of human development:-

"I should not have conceived it possible that so many children could have been collected together, without a single trace of beauty, or scarcely of intelligence, in so much as one individual; such mean, coarse, vulgar features and figures, betraying an unmistakably low origin, and ignorant and brutal parents. They did not appear wicked, but only stupid, animal and soulless. It must require many generations of better life to elicit a soul in them."

On a visit to Leeds Street in the 1860s , French writer Hippolyte Taine was alarmed by:-

"this swarming mass of human ugliness and misery."

He called the Irish quarter:-

"the nethermost circle of hell."

Taine on alcohol:-

"I know no place where drunkenness is so flaunted, so impudent, not only in the crooked side streets and mean courtyards where one expects to find it, but everywhere."

Taine on female drunks:-

"Livid, bearded old women came out of gin shops: their reeling gait, dismal eyes and fixed idiot grin are indescribable. They look as if their features had been slowly corroded by vitriol."


Source: "The Liverpool Underworld" by Michael Macilwee


Blue

[lynne99]

My relatives came from that area of Liverpool in those times. Eaton Street and Old Leeds Street. It makes me very upset. I cannot imagine my relatives behaving like that... The family in more recent times, 1880 onwards, have been tea total. I could cry for them.

[LukeJ]

The link is down. Is there another link?
Sounds sad and brutal
those quotes, and possibly over-exaggerated but im
Interested in reading it all

[MaryA]

The original post has been marked as a broken link, if an update is found, please let me know.

[alex69]

Hawthorne's Notebooks on Google Books. Try this link.

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=10A ... &q&f=false

[LukeJ]

Thanks Alex. I'll give that a read sometime.
Some of the things he says sounds just like today!